I try to consume as little plastic as possible, but I inevitably do. What do I do with all the plastic waste I've accumulated over the last year?
Recycling is a scam
I try to consume as little plastic as possible, but I inevitably do. What do I do with all the plastic waste I've accumulated over the last year?
Getting municipal waste disposal to deal with it will almost certainly be the best option, because they have more money and resources to throw at it than you do.
If for some reason you are utterly convinced that they are 100% going to put it in a shipping container, send it overseas, and hope it ends up someone else's problem, just fucking burn it (outdoors and where nothing human is downwind).
You did what you could, but it's not possible to live the lifestyle society expects we do and not create some forever-garbage.
>burn it
The hotter the better
If you've got real money, you can have Luke head down to Tashi Station and pick up a couple plasma converters.
http://www.kva-engineering.com/plasma_waste_converter.html
Recycling has always been a scam. Just throw your shit away in the trash anon. Your little bit of pollution won't make any difference.
Melt it down into giant ingot.
You need to do this in an oxygen free atmosphere though, otherwise it will burn
Incinerate it. Gas streams are easier to clean than liquid/solid waste, plus you get heat energy
Some basedfaced gay really hung an american flag over a pile of trash and called it "art" with deep and meaningful symbolism. God I fucking hate photographers.
>You HAVE to recycle or you will pay fine
>You have to consume LESS
What if we just forced retarded manufacturers to ditch plastic packaging? Ditch the complex plastic packaging, replace plastic bottles with multi use glass ones, use waxed paper for meat/cheese packaging etc.
Oh wait you cant do that because then it wont sell as well, better guilt trip people into doing meaningless labor like "recycling" then
>Should we learn how to deal with plastic
>Or should we regress to shittier and more expensive 1920s packaging
we learn how to deal with plastic
There is no "dealing with plastics".
Learn basic chemistry, even if you "recycle" parts of it you still get plastics with brittle and weak links that cannot be used for most of things plastic is used for.
"Deal with" doesn't necessarily mean "recycle 100%", waste is inevitable but that doesn't meant we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater
Can’t plastics be seriously compressed?
Yes, it’s the same principle they used to make those wood logs, the compression generates so much heat it melts the lignin and out comes a log.
They don’t do that for plastics because the log would not be worth anything, it’s still cheaper to return the shipping container back to the country it came from full of plastic waste. You have to return the container anyway, since north north america doesn’t make anything, they’d be empty otherwise.
could you make lignin balls?
Sending the plastic back to China isn't actually going to fix anything in the long run. If you institute that as a policy they're going to burn it all or throw it in the ocean, and it's going to wind its way back onto your doorstep.
i think china banned this shit already so the garbage has to go somewhere else
I'm with you on this.
Plastic is an amazing material, with so many potential benefits.
Yet the one benefit we actually latched onto was "cheap as fucking shit, literally use it once and throw it away."
Fuck these bans/boycotts on using plastics. Just tax the creation/import of plastic and add some regulation for the worst offenders (small pieces like straws and bags that even if you wanted to reuse or dispose of properly are just likely to break apart or blow out of your hands).
Make reusable containers out of plastic, and actually reuse them.
Stop using the particularly bullshit plastic compositions that absorb aromatic chemicals or stains.
And if there's a strong case for non-reusable plastic in a certain context (perhaps hermetically sealing products), the taxation will help to ensure that it was actually a strong reason.
>What if we just forced retarded manufacturers to ditch plastic packaging?
this is the correct answer. pushing the responsibility onto the consumer is obvious bullshit and deflects attention from the real source of the problem. capitalism has no moral compass and does not care about the environment. it has to be regulated or it will do any awful shit that it can to help the bottom line.
the problem here though is that this isn't anything that i can do as a consumer. i have a bunch of fucking shitty plastic whore garbage and i need to do something with it.
recycling ideology from the 1860's
lmao
>thank the Lord we have less regulations now than we did in 1860
Convert all the waste into plastic cordage. Use it to enhance your off the grid lifestyle
Mix it with cement to make a polymer based concrete.
Funny, I was going to say mix it with melted metals and other assorted garbage to create chinesium.
Doesn’t plastic come from oils? From the bottom of earth’s crust? Why not just put it back?
i see you are a man of our Lord Jesus Christ. bless you sir